Ground Zero Imam: 'I Don't Believe in Religious Dialogue'

Is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf -- founder of the hugely controversial Ground Zero mosque -- lying to the American public and his fellow New Yorkers?

Pajamas Media has uncovered extraordinary contradictions between what he says in English and what he says in Arabic that raise serious questions about his true intentions in the construction of the mosque.

On May 25, 2010, Abdul Rauf wrote an article for the New York Daily News insisting:

My colleagues and I are the anti-terrorists. We are the people who want to embolden the vast majority of Muslims who hate terrorism to stand up to the radical rhetoric. Our purpose is to interweave America's Muslim population into the mainstream society. [emphasis added]

Oh, really?

Only two months before, on March 24, 2010, Abdul Rauf is quoted in an article in Arabic for the website Rights4Allentitled "The Most Prominent Imam in New York: 'I Do Not Believe in Religious Dialogue.'"

Yes, you read that correctly and, yes, that is an accurate translation of Abdul Rauf. And Right4All is not an obscure blog, but the website of the media department of Cairo University, the leading educational institution of the Arabic-speaking world.

In the article, the imam said the following of the “religious dialogue” and “interweaving into the mainstream society” that he so solemnly seems to advocate in the Daily News and elsewhere:

This phrase is inaccurate. Religious dialogue as customarily understood is a set of events with discussions in large hotels that result in nothing. Religions do not dialogue and dialogue is not present in the attitudes of the followers, regardless of being Muslim or Christian. The image of Muslims in the West is complex which needs to be remedied.

But that was two months ago. More recently -- in fact on May 26, one day after his Daily News column -- Abdul Rauf appeared on the popular Islamic website Hadiyul-Islam with even more disturbing opinions. That’s the same website where, ironically enough, a fatwa was simultaneously being issued forbidding a Muslim to sell land to a Christian, because the Christian wanted to build a church on it.